Coinbase (Company)
Basics * "Backed by trusted investors and used by millions of customers globally, Coinbase is one of the most popular and well-known brokers and trading platforms in the world. The Coinbase platform makes it easy to securely buy, use, store and trade digital currency. Users can purchase bitcoins, Ether and Litecoin and since 2018 many other coins from Coinbase through a digital wallet available on Android & iPhone or through trading with other users on the company’s Global Digital Asset Exchange (which rebranded to Coinbase Pro) subsidiary. Coinbase Pr currently operates in the US, Europe, UK, Canada, Australia and Singapore. Coinbase Pr does not currently charge any transfer fees for moving funds between your Coinbase account and Coinbase Pr account. For now, the selection of tradable currencies will, however, depend on the country you live in." * Uses technology built by Parity * "Coinbase's recent staking-as-a-service announcement is an answer to Proof-of-Stake (PoS) token holders desire for inflation offsetting rewards, particularly for those who who cannot stake on their own; stakers can anticipate rewards of 5-8% per year which is not interest, but an inflation reward with governance rights attached. Governance rights mostly amount to network votes, like the recent Tezos' Athens protocol vote" Token * Together with Circle and CENTRE it has a stablecoin called USD Coin Pro's & Cons * Pros: Good reputation, security, reasonable fees, beginner friendly, stored currency is covered by Coinbase insurance. * Cons: Customer support, limited payment methods, limited countries supported, non-uniform rollout of services worldwide, Coinbase Pr suitable for technical traders only. Team * Armstrong, Brian; founder * Srinivasan, Balaji; former CTO * Ehrsam, Fred; founder, stepped back end January 2017. Now a board member * Romero, Dan; vice-president and GM * Brian Brooks; Chief Legal Officer; Brooks comes from mortgage giant Fannie Mae, where he served as General Counsel and Executive Vice-President. * Jeff Horowitz; Chief Compliance Officer; formerly global head of compliance at Pershing. * Surojit Chatterjee; Chief Product Officer, formerly 11 years at Google, as VP. Chatterjee is Coinbase’s first chief product officer since the departure of Jeremy Henrickson in December 2018, the company confirmed. * Tim Wagner; VP of enginering; a veteran of Amazon Web Services, to be its vice president of engineering * Michael Li; VP of data; Li spent the last seven years at LinkedIn, most recently as its head of analytics and data science. * Chris Dodds, Board of Directors; who also who serves on the board of directors of The Charles Schwab Corporation. Chris brings world-class leadership skills, deep knowledge of the financial services industry, and significant financial and accounting experience. His extensive expertise will be an asset to the Coinbase leadership team as we focus on scaling our business. Chris started a 21-year journey with Schwab in 1986, holding a variety of financial positions in treasury, corporate development, and financial planning and analysis throughout his tenure at the company. He served as Vice President of Corporate Finance and Mergers and Acquisitions from 1989 to 1993, and Treasurer from 1993 to 1997. Chris was also the company’s Corporate Controller, followed by eight years as Chief Financial Officer from 1999 until 2007. He transitioned to serving as a Director of Schwab Bank in 2007, and joined the Board of The Charles Schwab Corporation in 2014, where he serves as Chairman of the Risk Committee. In 2008, Chris became a senior advisor in the Financial Services practice at The Carlyle Group, a private equity firm. After 10 years there, he transitioned to The Cynosure Group, another private equity firm, where he currently serves as a senior advisor. * Marcus, David; Board of Directors, Vice President of Messaging Products at Facebook. Prior to Messenger, David was President of PayPal, where he led the payments company’s global expansion and product strategy. Under his leadership, PayPal brought back its technology and product centric DNA, won back developers and small businesses, and acquired Braintree (parent company of the popular P2P payment app, Venmo) that further accelerated the overall growth of the company. David joined PayPal after the acquisition of his last startup, mobile payments company, Zong, and led Mobile products before ultimately taking the leadership role at the company. * Mark Nesbitt, engineer * Luke Youngblood, previously a solutions architect at Amazon Web Services (AWS), has joined Coinbase (3-2019) to build products for staking and governance projects, a sector of the industry enjoying an increasing amount of social and investor attention * Ron Bernstein; Product Lead of Paradex at Coinbase * Josh Ellithorpe; Senior Software engineer (BCH fan) * The wife of 0x founder Will Warren worked for Coinbase * Alex Kroeger; Previously data science for Coinbase Pro Investors & investments Investors in Coinbase * Adam Draper; early investor in Coinbase after being pitched about a Bitcoin wallet by Brian Armstrong himself. * Andreessen Horowitz; investor (25mil) * Ankur Nandwani; now advisor of BAT * Silbert, Barry; through Digital Currency Group (around 500k) * Bitfury Group, investor * Blockchain Capital, investor * Has investment from Union Square Ventures * Backing (11-2-2020) AZTEC. Investments made by Coinbase * Has been known to invest big in stablecoins * Was a sponsor of Coin Center but not on the website anymore as of 6-2019 * Is backing NEAR * In Q3 of 2018 alone they already invested in nine more companies, including: Horizon Games, Coinmine and Public Market. * And acquired the Distributed Systems team, who joined Identity group and officially closed the Keystone acquisition * Has invested in OpenZeppelin * "Coinbase is putting money to work as part of a bid to grow the decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem. Announced Tuesday, the US cryptocurrency exchange is investing 1 million USDC each in lending protocols Compound and dYdX. Called the “USDC Bootstrap Fund,” Coinbase says the new fund will support developers by “investing USDC directly in the protocol.”" * Invested $25,000 in The Block, which was returned after conflict accusation. * Was part of a $2.4M seed round (1-10-2019) in InstaDapp. (In which Balaji Srinivasan, the former CTO of Coinbase, also participated) Partnerships and other * Is a consortium member of Facebook's Libra and therefor a possible node of the coin's network. * Also created the Token project and GDAX * Attender of Satoshi Roundtable * Used to be a Barclays partner (not anymore 2019) * And in the same quarter also onboarded 25 clients to Coinbase Custody, including Multicoin Capital, MetaStable, and Blockchain Capital. * As of 7-2019 on the partner & clients list of ZeppelinOS. * Grayscale Investments has chosen Coinbase Custody to serve as the new security provider for its digital asset holdings, the two companies announced 3-8-2019; Coinbase Custody, which Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong says already holds around $1B in digital assets, will act as the custodian for Grayscale's investment products. Grayscale claims to hold $2.7 billion in total assets under management, according to its most recent quarterly report, more than doubling its Q1 holdings of $1.2B * Coinbase Custody is partners with Securitize * Founding member of the Crypto Rating Council (9-2019). Coinbase Ventures * Venture arm of Coinbase. Investments * Invested in Coda. * Invested in UMA. * Was part of an $8.2M seed round for Compound in May of 2018. * Gave seed money to Matic * Participated (11-2019) in a funding round of 4 million for Messari.Category:Companies/Organisations